Short Story - Can You See Me

 THE room – well you could hardly call it a room, more like a cupboard – was a dump.

 The walls had been painted lime green, probably by someone doing community service for dealing mind-blowing drugs, the sink was clogged with some disgusting discharge.

 

In one corner, crates of empty lager bottles were stacked up to the ceiling. In another corner, boxes and boxes of Walkers crisps – he half expected Gary Lineker to leap out at any moment - were piled high. There was an odour pervading the air which could best be described as Eau de Stench.

In the middle of the room was a tattered old dentist chair, and hanging on one of the walls, a framed photograph of Tommy Cooper. Hadn't Tommy Cooper died whilst performing?

Joey turned the photograph around. Not the sort of thing you want to see when you are about to make your first appearance as a comic.

It was a talent contest and the social club was nothing special to look at, just a flat-roofed, one-storey building with a fake mahogany bar which stretched the length of the room and a small stage with its cheap looking mic stand plonked down in glorious isolation.  Joey was the opening act and therefore the first to use 'the room'. He stared into a filthy rectangle mirror with cracks running from all four corners which distorted his image, making him look like some scary fairground mirror apparition, even uglier than Joey thought he was.

Joey was 32, stood 5ft 4in tall in his bare feet, rotund, with a circular boyish face - some said he looked a bit like Danny de Vito but the Hollywood star wasn't ginger and didn't have freckles.  He was petrified at the thought of going on stage and decided the best way to cope was to hide behind an image. He'd chosen the stage name Joe 90 and wore a pair of massive black spectacles, adopting the persona of a character from a 1960s British science-fiction puppet TV series which was one of his granddad's favourite shows.

In the show, Joe 90 gained the abilities of scientists and pilots when wearing his special glasses. Joey hoped that his pair would have a similar effect, turning him into a Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr. 

He was wearing a light grey cotton suit he'd bought from Burton's in a sale the previous week, a white M & S shirt and a black tie he'd last won at his granddad's funeral eight years ago.

Joey adjusted his tie, took a swig of his Bud and realised he needed a pee. He didn't want to go into the club and use the public toilet there. Ever since he was young, Joey had been obsessed with the idea that he had a small willy.  His wife, Sharon, had never made any observations, but there again Sharon never said anything during sex. So whenever possible, he peed in private. He stood on a beer crate and urinated into the sink.

Joey had just zipped up when he heard a voice behind him singing a familiar refrain. It was The Ying Tong Song, a hit for The Goons, an anarchic, loony trio of radio comedians who were the nation's favourites in the 1950s. Joey's granddad had taught him to sing every single word of all their best known tunes.  So when Joey turned around to find a wizened old man, wearing a white fishermen's woollen jumper, red braces and a white bobble hat, sitting in the dentist chair he was gobsmacked. The man was sporting a pair of bright red glasses even bigger than Joe 90's massive specs. He was the spitting image of Spike Milligan, the most madcap member of The Goons.

'Can you see me?'

 'Yes,' replied a startled Joey.

'Good then I'm here.'

 'But you're dead!' gasped Joey.

'How dare you, you swine,' said Milligan who spoke in a slow, precise fashion as if he was giving careful consideration to each and every word, even though he had a lifelong reputation for rattling off zany, off-the-wall comments,  'Yes, this is me, Milligan, Spike, comedian of this parish, well late of this parish, but that's another story.'

 'How did you...what are ...?'asked Joey.

Milligan took off his woolly hat, scratched his scalp which was bald apart from a few random grey strands of hair and started to sing 'I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas' as he spun quickly in the chair, not noticing that it was getting lower and lower until it came to an abrupt halt and he jolted upright, knocking his glasses off.

 Joe anxiously eyed the clock on the wall, 10 minutes to show time.

'Been listening to you rehearsing, not going down too well is it?'

Joe protested. 

'Give it up,' said Milligan who started the rub the glasses with his woolly hat.

 At that moment the door opened and in walked Sharon. She was a striking blonde, at least four inches taller than Joey, with a neat, trim figure and healthy if slightly over-tanned complexion. She was attractive in a Wag sort of way but had an unflattering habit of pursing her lips in a rather severe manner as if she was always downwind of somebody's fart.

 Joey had worked as a benefits office clerk since he left the college where he'd met Sharon who was doing a hairdressing course. She was Joey's first real girlfriend and they got married at 21. Joey couldn't believe his luck and was deliriously happy at first but then Sharon had a big win on the bingo and set up her own hairdressing salon. She became obsessed with watching The Apprentice and Dragon's Den and discovered 'business acumen'.

To Joey's dismay she became bossy, especially with him, career minded and ambitious, so much so that starting a family was put on hold.   Sharon had always said that one of things that attracted her to Joey was that he could make her laugh.  And Joey was a joker, with Sharon, with friends, the life and soul of the party, but that wasn't the real Joey, even Sharon didn't know the real Joey.

 Lately she had become convinced that this wisecracking had 'career potential'. Joey had sat in bewildered silence when she unveiled a PowerPoint presentation identifying joke 'targets' and an interactive whiteboard analysis of laughter.

 She urged him to go on Britain's Got Talent and last week came home and informed her husband that she had entered him into a talent contest. He didn't want to do it, he was scared witless but Sharon had insisted. Telling jokes for friends was one thing but in front of an audience...

 'What are you doing here?' said Joey to his wife, conscious of the strange looking man sitting behind him.

 'Come to see you babe, ain't I, wish you good luck. Brought Shane, he's just getting the champagne in. Hope you don't mind, Chantelle's got one of her headaches but Shane wanted to come out, says he's up for a bit of laugh.'

 Shane was a professional footballer who played for the local League Two club and who had brought his bimbo girlfriend into Sharon's hairdressing salon a few weeks back. Ever since then her conversations had been littered with 'Shane said this...Shane said that.'

Shane was always immaculately turned out in designer leisure gear with teeth that glistened in tandem with his ice white trainers. There was never a hair out of place, gel always expertly applied to his jet black mop. Joey had never seen him play but imagined that he never, ever, had a spot of mud on him. Every time they met, he called Joey 'mate' and playfully punched him in the stomach but Joey had come across his sort before and wasn't taken in.

Joe knew that Sharon was itching to move up the social ladder. She had already worked her way through most of the Ikea brochure and had holidayed in all the Canary Islands. Comedian or footballer, he didn't think she was that bothered as long they got her to where she wanted to be.

Sharon gave her husband a couple of rather vague air kisses and said: 'Luv you hon.'

'Oh by the way this is...'

He turned around to see the dentist chair was empty and the intruder no-where to be seen.

'Who babe? There's no-one there.'

'Oh sorry, must have gone.'  

'OK see ya. Oh babe, you're not going to wear that are you? Looks minging,' she said, pointing to the bobble hat resting on the chair.'

'Huh, no, course not, don't know who's that is.'

As she departed, Norman, the compere for the evening, a tall, gangly man in his late 50s with greasy, combed back grey hair tied in a rather wimpish pony tail, and wearing a tacky looking monkey suit, popped his head around the door.

'Five minutes to kick-off chief,' he said, whistling Barry Manilow's Copacabana through the sweet imitation cigarette he was chewing as he trotted down the corridor. Joey removed another Bud from his Lidl bag and turned around to see Spike back on the chair.

 'Give what up?' asked Joey.

''Going out there, trying to be funny, and - it's the main reason I'm here - telling that joke about Prince Charles.'

 There was a look of astonishment on Joe's face, and he blushed like a schoolboy caught doing the deed by his mother.

 'How the...but... it's our best gag.'

'Best? A rude, offensive, joke about the heir to the throne?''

'You can talk, my granddad told me all about you and Prince Charles.

Joey could vividly remember the day his granddad told him that Spike Milligan had called the Prince of Wales a 'little grovelling bastard' on a TV show. The comedian later faxed the Prince saying 'I suppose a Knighthood is out of the question.'

'You idiot, that was in fun, I got made a Knight.'

 Joey saw this as his opportunity: 'Ah so it's okay for you to poke fun at someone but not me?'

'Fun? Where's the fun in your act. I've heard you, slagging off the Millibands, whoever they are, and that girl, what's her name, Cheryl. That's not poking fun, that's cruel, vicious jibes and what you're planning to say about Prince Charles is even worse. Is that what you call comedy? Disgusting that's what I call it.'

'But what if it makes people laugh?' replied Joey half-heartedly, thinking back to the whiteboard.

'It's the reason they laugh that counts. Your routine's just verbal bullying. Is that want you want to be? You're not man enough to stand up to your own wife and tell her to stop bullying you, so instead you're going to go out there and pick on other people.'

 'No!'

'Bloody liar. Just wait until I see your granddad.'

 Joey stared open-mouthed at the old man.

 'Granddad? ' he whimpered as his bottom lip quivered.

 Joey suddenly had an image of himself as a boy - fat, ginger Joey, the focal point of every bully-boy (and girl) to come his way at school. He remembered the constant insults (especially the willie ones in the showers), and every sob and whimper as he made his way home to a cold, frigid house with parents far more concerned with fighting each other then worrying about what was happening to their only child.

 Only on his too infrequent visits to see his granddad did Joey feel really happy. They'd sit in front of the telly, listen to records or granddad would tell funny stories which made Joey laugh so much his sides ached.

Eventually he copied his granddad and learned how to make the bullies laugh, if they were laughing with him, they weren't laughing at him and if they weren't laughing at him, they weren't hitting him, spitting on him.

 Milligan rose gingerly of the chair, put his hand on Joe's shoulder and looked at him in a fatherly fashion.

'If you're going to be put yourself on the line out there, it has to be because you want to, really want to. Because if they don't like you, then they'll hate you and I think you've had enough of that in your life already don't you?'  

Close up, Milligan's face was wrinkled and ashen grey but his eyes were alive and sparkling. He edged closer and whispered into Joey's ear:

'Sorry son, you and you're jokes just aren't funny. I don't think you really want to do this, do you?'

Joey winced and stepped back, a desolate look on his face. The ghost of his granddad's idol wasn't laughing. Tears began to trickle down his face. But there weren't the tears of a clown, there were tears of realisation that the victim had let himself be bullied into becoming a bully.

A few moments later the club's crackly PA system burst into life with 'There's No Business Like Show Business'. There was a knock on the door and MC Norman bellowed: 'You're on pal.' When there was no response he entered to find an empty room and the dentist chair spinning slowly around with a large pair of black glasses on it.

© Patrick O’Connor 2012 - All Rights Reserved

Comprehension Questions for "Can you see me?"

 

1. How old is Joey?

2. Who was Joe90?

3. When were the Goons 'the nations' favourite'?

4. What was Spike wearing?

5. Where did Joey work after he left college?

6. What is Shanes' profession?

7. What do we  mean when we say  'Sharon was itching to move up the social ladder' ?

8. Describe Norman.

9. Does Spike like Joeys' routine?

10. What do you think was the reason that Joey decided not to continue with his routine?

(Answer these questions using the comments, send us a message on Facebook, and we will tell you if you're right - or not.)